I hear concession speeches on a daily basis from peeps who bemoan the power of hand held devices and how they lord over the masses. Good points are made and analyzed in abbreviated spiels about how technology has us wrapped around its greedy little fingers and all I can do is shake my head in wonder.

As in, I wonder why such a big deal is being made in the bottom of the ninth inning when technology- along with lingerie and cheating on taxes- has separated us from the rest of the creatures who inhabit the planet since cave people discovered fire. Imagine if cave people had Instagram and Facebook back then?

OMG Y’all! So I was putzing around with my flint hand axe and some iron pyrite I had in the cupboard and yowza! We ended up grilling, you read that right, grilling our bison and then throwing it in the pot with wild carrots, potatoes and other assorted goodies for a couple hours and . . instant yum! Recipe below . . .

Of course, there would’ve been the random cave person who trolled this success with a common sense query such as Umm, maybe we invent the fire extinguisher before going all high five?

Technology is how we record how far we’ve come. From fires to tires with volumes of betwixt and between. It’s sort of like the cosmically collective door jamb where heights are scribbled in intermittent gallops of time. Maybe humans never stopped to think about how there would come a day when progress busted out of its doorframe with such rapidity that not even skyscrapers could contain it. But hey, we’ve been there for a while now.

Orwell wrote at length about Big Brother, but as with so many cautionary tales, we were so swept up in his artful descriptions of a monochromatic society that we buried his lead. Ray Bradbury was more fruitful, in my humble opinion, because I still remember how scared shit I got after reading Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury described an age where humans distrusted pretty words and relied on “parlor wall” sized televisions for all their information. Hell . . he was describing my parents!

That was the first time I considered artificial intelligence as something that could end up biting our asses. But since I was suffering from the same affliction as most humans, I went back to my regularly scheduled itinerary.

Artificial intelligence is going to take what it wants. Let’s be honest, it’s already doing it. The idea that we’re going to stem the advance once this boogeyman has already breached our business isn’t a hopeful reproach to our plight. It’s a careless whisper. Because the truth of the matter is that we have no excuse. We’ve been forewarned . . for centuries in fact.

But it’s the same all over when it comes to the top of the food chain. Humans are really good at complaining about a problem only after it’s become a problem. Put another way, they like to talk about it if only to say their piece before proceeding to do all the things they just bitched and moaned about.

I use AI in some form or other every day, several times a day. I’m not damning it, I’m not bemoaning the fact, it’s just the truth. But I know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em. I’ve never used ChatGPT for example, because writing is one of the few things I can do really well so leaning on artificial sweeteners makes little sense. Besides, writing is supposed to be hard. Shortcuts are anathema to the process.

Does this mean we’re doomed? I dunno, I happen to believe that question has been asked since the Mayans ran out of calendar. We’re still here. Differently but, still here. Hate and poverty and famine are still our biggest obstacles to better days ahead, same as it ever was. If by chance the technology humankind created ends up turning against it, this won’t be a Shakespearean tale of sinister proportions. Nope, it’ll simply be a matter of technology doing its sentient best to clean up our mess.

We’re the who in this whodunit.

David Byrne- In The Future (1985)

 

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